Monero. Price of cryptocurrency: $ 177.316599

The price Monero today is 177.32 USD, and the trading volume in 24 hours - 176,388,167 USD. The crypto asset has grown by 7.4% over the day. Currently, the coin’s market capitalization is 3,270,913,909 USD, and has 0.00000000 coins in circulation with the max supply of 18,446,744 coins XMR.

What is Monero (XMR)?

Monero was launched in 2014, and its goal is simple: to make transactions confidential and anonymous. Although it is generally believed that BTC can hide a person's identity, it is often easy to trace payments back to their original source, as blockchains are transparent. On the other hand, XMR is designed to hide senders and recipients using advanced cryptography.

The team behind the project says privacy and security are their top priorities, with ease of use and efficiency coming second. Its goal is to ensure that all users are protected, regardless of how technologically competent they are.

Overall, XMR aims to ensure that payments can be made quickly and inexpensively, without fear of censorship.

Who are the founders of Monero?

Initially, seven developers participated in the creation of Monero, five of whom decided to remain anonymous. It was rumored that XMR was also invented by Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin.

XMR's origins can be traced back to Bytecoin, a decentralized cryptocurrency focused on privacy that was launched in 2012. Two years later, a Bitcointalk forum member known only as thankfulfortoday forked the BCN codebase, and Monero was born. They proposed "controversial changes" to Bytecoin, which other community members disagreed with, and decided to take matters into their own hands.

Hundreds of developers are believed to have contributed to XMR over the years.

What makes Monero special?

There are a few things that make Monero unique. One of the most important goals of the project is to achieve the highest possible level of decentralization, which means that the user does not need to trust anyone on the network.

Privacy is achieved through several distinctive features. While every Bitcoin in circulation has its own serial number, which means that cryptocurrency usage can be tracked, XMR is completely interchangeable. By default, details about senders, recipients, and the amount transferred by the cryptocurrency are hidden, and Monero advocates say this gives an advantage over competing privacy coins like Zcash, which are " selectively transparent".

Obfuscation is achieved by using ring signatures. Here, the output of past transactions is selected from the block chain and acts as decoys, meaning that third-party observers can't tell who signed them. 

To ensure that transactions cannot be linked to each other, hidden addresses are created for each individual transaction, which is used only once.

All these distinctive features have led to the fact that XMR is increasingly used for illegal transactions instead of BTC, especially in the darknet markets. Governments around the world, especially the US, have offered hundreds of thousands of dollars to anyone who can crack the Monero code.

How many Monero (XMR) coins are in circulation?

Monero is a bit unusual, as there was no token sale for XMR, nor was there any pre-mining of tokens. At the time of writing a negotiable offer XMR is 17 703 471 coins.

This cryptocurrency is designed to be resistant to integrated circuits for specific applications that are commonly used to mine new coins. In theory, this means that you can mine XMR using everyday computing equipment.

Overall, there will eventually be a total of 18.4 million XMR in circulation, and this limit is expected to be reached on May 31, 2022. After that, miners will be stimulated by "tail emissions" with a small amount of XMR being fed into the system every 60 seconds as a reward. This approach is considered to be more efficient than relying on a transaction fee.

How is the Monero network protected?

One of the main goals of Monero is to prevent centralization, and this network uses a consensus mechanism called CryptoNight, based on proof of work. This prevents large mining farms from becoming a dominant force.